View a FREE sample

This test consists of 5 short answer questions, 10 short essay questions, and 1 (of 3) essay topics.

Short Answer Questions

1. What repetition technique is used in the story's opening paragraph?

2. Gin mentions her "nonna's cottage" (240). Whose cottage is this?

3. From the context of page 234, what "apocalypse" is the allusion to the Four Horsemen referring to?

4. In what sense is the drowned woman also still constantly in the narrator's thoughts?

5. What characteristic of the area around the beach is conveyed with its nickname, the "Gold Coast"?

Short Essay Questions

1. In what sense does the narrator mean that, after the night on Oak Street Beach, the dead woman was always "with" him and Gin?

2. What do the first paragraph's details about the father's car convey about the family's social class?

3. What is the inclusion of details about the House of Dong intended to convey?

4. What is the rhetorical purpose of the narrator's comments about the "bloodless way in which a young man discards his own virginity" (235)?

5. What is foreshadowed by the page 233 description of their "lover's lane"?

6. What does Gin dream about the dead woman and her grandmother's cottage?

7. What plot events--one immediate and one later--are foreshadowed by the narrator's description of "the bodies of lovers...visible in lightning flashes, scattered like the fallen on a battlefield" (234)?

8. What messages about gender, sex, and adulthood are being conveyed in the phrase "entered you as if passing through a gateway into the rest of my life," which the narrator uses to describe his beliefs about what is happening on the beach that night?

9. How is the From Here to Eternity love scene evoked ironically when the narrator and Gin are on the beach?

10. What does the narrator say might have happened if the dead woman had washed up beside them while he and Gin were trying to have sex on the beach, and why is Gin so offended?

Essay Topics

Write an essay for ONE of the following topics:

Essay Topic 1

Write an essay that makes and defends a claim about the role of free will in "We Didn't." Be sure to support your assertions with textual evidence.

Essay Topic 2

Write an essay in which you make and defend a claim about the symbolic nature of Gin's dreams about the dead woman. Be sure to support your ideas with evidence from the text.

Essay Topic 3

Write an essay in which you analyze the strategies that Dybek uses to build the tension that conveys the narrator's sexual desire. Comment on how the use of these strategies to build tension changes after the discovery of the body on the beach, and why. Use textual evidence to support your claims.

(see the answer keys)

This section contains 1,165 words (approx. 4 pages at 300 words per page) View a FREE sample